Can Disney take geolocation, Gowalla mainstream?

Disney on Thursday announced a geolocation partnership with Gowalla and may take the whole sector mainstream.

The companies announced a deal where Disney will use Gowalla---a social network where you share places you visit with pass port stamps---in its resorts. In a nutshell, visitors to Disney World and Disneyland can connect with family and friends through custom Disney Gowalla pages. When guests visit a park or ride they can use Gowalla's Passport Stamps to allow others to track their experience.

Multiple locations will feature Gowalla stamps and virtual scrapbooks can be compiled as folks visit areas such as the Finding Nemo musical, which is pretty good by the way, and other areas.

We’re launching over 100 new featured stamps within Disney Parks today, with over 100 more expected by the end of the year. Each featured Disney stamp was painstakingly rendered in pixel form by Gowalla with the guidance of the Disney creative team — bringing you an experience that is truly 100 percent Gowalla and 100 percent Disney.

To date, geolocation services have largely been the domain of techies. The rest of the population hasn't quite hopped on board the geolocation bandwagon. However, there's nothing more mainstream than Disney World. Disney could introduce Gowalla and geolocation services to a much broader population.

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